A friend lost years of photos on an old iPhone. Trying to help, I noticed every "recovery" app wanted to upload the phone's data to their servers — which felt insane for something as private as your whole camera roll. So I built the opposite: OfflinePhotoRecovery, a macOS app that recovers photos/videos from an iPhone completely offline. It talks to the phone over USB and macOS blocks it from the internet entirely — nothing ever leaves your Mac. What it does: Finds photos/videos on the device, including ones inside other apps Reads encrypted + unencrypted backups Flags what's in "Recently Deleted" vs removed from the library What I learned: iOS backup internals are a rabbit hole (WAL-mode SQLite, keybag decryption, cryptographic erasure). Also that honesty matters — some photos are permanently gone, and the app says so instead of pretending. Free and open source (MIT). I'm the dev — would love feedback, especially on the offline-only approach. Repo: https://github.com/ashiqu-ali/OfflinePhotoRecovery   submitted by   /u/ashiquali [link]   [comments]